For research purpose or medical procedure, oftentimes it is required to separate a specific type of cells from a tissue taken from a living body for further analysis or for performing a biopsy. Referring to FIG. 1, a conventional cell isolation and collection method includes the follow steps: a sample preparing step 101 in which a tissue sample is prepared, a crushing step 102 in which the tissue sample is crushed, a centrifuging step 103 in which the crushed tissue sample is aliquoted into a number of centrifuge tubes and is centrifuged, a collecting step 104 in which pellet in each of the centrifuge tubes is collected, a first adding step 105 in which the pellet of each centrifuge tube is transferred into another centrifuge tube and a solution containing antibody-conjugated magnetic beads is added thereinto, a mixing step 106 in which the pellets and the solution are fully mixed so as to conjugate the target cells with the beads, a first magnetically attracting step 107 in which a magnetically attractive force is provided to move the beads conjugated with the target cells to bottom parts of the centrifuge tubes, a removing step 108 in which the supernatant is removed from each of the centrifuge tubes, a second adding step 109 in which an enzyme solution is added to break the conjugation between the beads and the target cells, a second magnetically attracting step 110 in which the magnetically attractive force is provided to magnetically attract the beads and the target cells are then moved into different centrifuge tubes, and a centrifuging and collecting step 111 in which a cycle of centrifuging the target cells, removing supernatants, and adding buffer for mixing is repeated for a number of times.
The above-mentioned cell isolation and collection method is relatively complicated, and at least part of the operation in each of the steps is performed by a human operator, which is attention demanding. In addition, the purity of the target cells may be adversely affected by human operator error, and the efficiency of the entire operation is relatively low.